Moon Island (33 page)

Something was coming for her, searching for her.

A liquid wash of terror poured through May. She couldn’t allow herself to be trapped here in Doone’s bedroom. Sometimes the door wouldn’t open, as though an invisible shoulder held it tight, but it was open by a hair’s breadth now, just as she had left it. She forced herself into motion, although fear locked her limbs. Her mouth dried with wordless gratitude for being barefoot as she slipped out of the room. The house itself had become a listening shell, the silence noisy with whispers and sighs. May hung for an instant in the black hallway, motionless as a suit of clothes in a wardrobe, all her being trying to focus on what the threat might be. There was someone near, she could feel it in the tiny currents that electrified her skin.

As silently as a moving shadow she flitted across the stairhead. She could see no one in the narrow segment of the room visible at the foot.

John’s bedroom door stood wide open. She melted into the blackness behind it and with her chest bursting and blood hammering in her head took the first breath since the footsteps had halted. They were moving again now. They came unhurriedly across the room to the foot of the stairs.

May retreated step by step until her knees came into contact with the edge of her father’s bed. The steps advancing up the stairs now sounded as loud as a drumbeat. There was a shaft of light, lapping up the walls outside and sending a moving slice of visibility around the angle of the open door and across a wedge of floor. She stared in mute horror at the pattern revealed in the rug, then like a leaf falling she crumpled sideways into the bedcovers. She drew her knees up to her chest and pulled a blanket over her head. Her eyes squeezed shut and her breath stopped in her chest as she lay and waited to be found.

The bedclothes next to her face smelled of her father’s body. When she was little she used to run into her parents’ bedroom and climb into the warm hollow between them. She remembered that her father’s smell was always strong but good, like hay or sawn wood. It came back to her now, and the memory of safety and security with it like a glimpse of a lost world.

The footsteps passed into Doone’s bedroom and the light swept away with them.

At the back of the house where May lay huddled the sound of the sea was muffled. The tiny noises that reached her from across the hallway were much louder. She heard a soft swish like clothing brushing against furniture and the bump of small objects being moved around. That these sounds were audible and yet inexplicable made fear tighten its tourniquet grip on her. She was locked into immobility, but she could feel the bubbles of a scream or a sob forcing their way up into her throat. She closed her eyes tighter and bit the inside of her mouth to contain it.

Suddenly there was a snap. A second later the steps were coming back again, much louder and firmer.

It would find her now, whatever it was.

She hunched and waited. But the steps passed her father’s door and trod down the stairs. They went across the living-room beneath, then she couldn’t hear them any more, nor anything else except the endless voice of the sea.

She had no idea how long she lay in the same position. It was a long time, because when she did try to move hot wires of pain shot through her joints. She dared to push back the blanket and lifted her head to look around. There was nothing, except the darkened room.

After some more long minutes she found the courage to roll sideways and put her feet to the floor. They were numb with cold and cramp in her legs almost made her stumble. May crept across to Doone’s bedroom and with a brave sweep of her hand she clicked on the light. The brightness of it burned her eyes, but even so she saw at once that the diary was missing from its place.

A cold hand touched the back of her neck. She spun round, gasping, but there was nothing there.

From the window May saw that there were lights still moving on Moon Island. She could run out of this house with its echoes and footfalls, and simply row across to find the others. Kevin and Joel, mumbling about how stoned they were. Gail, and Lucas and Ivy. The moment she thought of it she was overcome by a longing to get to Ivy. Bold, sarcastic Ivy would pinch out this fear for her like an ant between her silver fingernails. To
go to Ivy
, that was what she must do.

She ran down the stairs, her breath snicking in her chest. The room was empty, just as she had left it, the television remote dropped on the counter. She threw open the porch door and ran across the strip of garden to the beach steps. Across the shingle she ran faster, even though the stones hurt her bare feet. A rowing dinghy, one of the Beams’ that they used to reach the sailboat at high water, was moored to a little white buoy. The oars were revealed neatly shipped inside when she tore back the tarpaulin cover.

May undid the mooring line and at a run pushed the dinghy away from the beach. She threw herself over the side and fell into the bottom. She was soaked to the waist, but hardly even noticed it. Her sister, she must get to her sister. A mixture of love and anticipatory relief made her sob, and there were tears on her cheeks as she fitted the lightweight oars and began to row. The boat skimmed over the flat water. The moon was up and the wake lapped behind the transom like molten pewter.

May looked back over her shoulder only once to check her progress towards the island. Then the prow of the boat ran into the beach with a soft judder and she let her head fall forward for one second in relief. Sweat from the effort of rowing so hard almost blinded her. She stumbled out of the boat and made the motion of pulling it further up into the sand. She realised then that there were no other boats beached anywhere along the glimmering crescent. The houses across on the bluff looked dark and gaunt. May had no idea what time it was.

On the beach she found the ashes of the bonfire. There were no embers left glowing at the heart of it but when she knelt down to touch it she felt the residue of heat. Glancing up from where she knelt she saw the lights again. They had receded into the trees. There was a pale glow, which wavered between the black boles of the spruces. ‘Ivy?’ she called out.

Her voice sounded weak and flat, and the salt-heavy air damped it into nothing. The tiny ripples breaking a yard away made an endless whisper. ‘Ivy?’

There was no answer. May thought suddenly of Doone’s sailboat gliding over the bay and the green skin of water closing over her body. The sea at her back seemed to pull at her, enticing her back to its innocent lacy edge and into the chilly beaten-silver oblivion beyond. Her soaking clothes were clammy against her legs.

May began to run. She pounded up the slope of sand away from the sea and over the lip of earth, where vegetation matted the margins of the beach. She stumbled across roots and brambles until she reached the black canopy of trees, then threw herself in among them. The light above and ahead tantalised her; it was further away, growing fainter. ‘Ivy,’ she screamed. ‘Wait for me.’

All around her was the shiver and rustle of woodland. She began to run again, clawing her way up the slope. Once the ground seemed to give way beneath her and she looked down into the hollow where she had once seen Lucas and Ivy together. She remembered the pallor of Ivy’s skin.

She was crying and gasping for breath as she scrambled on upwards. She had all but forgotten that there was no reason for her climb; all she could think of was setting a distance between herself and the cold beckoning of the sea. Ivy must be here somewhere. She had to reach her.

After another hundred yards, with her lungs threatening to burst inside her, May realised that she was plunging downhill. She must have crested the spine of the island and now she was running out of control towards the open sea. She crashed to a stop and looked around wildly, her breath as loud as tidal surges in her ears.

Over her head a huge oak tree spread its branches like veins against the sky. They seemed to toss with the wind, although it was a still night. May put her hands up to her hair and found it wet. Slick strands of it clung to her skull and her neck, and there was salt in her mouth and on her tongue.

She took one step backwards and another, away from the great tree. The melancholy and doom that hung about it reached out to clutch at her, as strong as gripping hands. Weakly she staggered another few yards. Ivy wasn’t here; she couldn’t be anywhere near this place.

There was a darker mass ahead of her, more solid than the woven trees and branches. A sweet-sharp smell of crushed juniper caught in her nostrils and wrist-thick tree roots caught her foot. The island was alive with footsteps, with the swish of bodies steadily advancing on her through the foliage. She froze into stillness, knowing that there was nowhere to run, her ears filling with the pin-sharp signals of threat as they closed in on her.

Her innards loosened as she shrank backwards, one step.

It was a fine house that he had built for himself, she saw that immediately she began the walk towards it over the headland. Robert Hanner had always liked the best and it had never been his habit to forgo what he wanted or imagined to be his due.

The house was positioned on a vantage point that gave a commanding view of the serene bay and its islands, but it was set somewhat at an angle so that the occupants might not always have to gaze directly at the restless waves. After the months she had spent aboard the
Dolphin
, more than three years ago now but still present in her mind and in her dreams, Sarah fully understood the reasons why Robert might not always wish to have the sea before his eyes.

There was a grey curl of smoke rising from one of the chimneys. As Sarah drew slowly closer the sturdy clapboard walls and the secure shingle of the roof told her this was a safe haven for the people within. There were dainty lace curtains looped at the lower windows and a tidy pile of split logs was stored under a lean-to at the side.

After her long search and the journey that had led her here she was in no great hurry nor, knowing what she now knew, was there any longer the pounding of hope and anticipation in her heart. Instead there was a bitter determination to finish the course she had begun and to have done with it at last. She slipped a hand into the deep pocket at her side and closed her fingers around the smooth handle of the knife. She had carried the weapon about with her for so long that it felt like her trusted companion, the only certain ally she could claim in the world.

When she reached the shelter of a clump of bushes Sarah sank down on a rock so that she was hidden from the windows of the house. She rested for a moment, drawing her loose coat around her, although the fading afternoon had not yet turned cool.

It seemed that Robert had chosen one of the sweetest spots imaginable to make his own. As it sank between bars of cloud the sun glittered on the sea and silvered the lines of breakers. The island in the bay’s shelter was a handsome crescent of rock and sand crowned with a proud ridge of dark pointed firs, and on this distant beach another fringe of smaller waves was breaking. The light was as clear as spring water, and the air was fresh with salt and the scent of thyme and juniper.

‘The Captain’s House,’ the woman at the lodging house in Pittsharbor had called it, although Sarah knew well enough that Robert Hanner was no retired sea-captain. Wherever and from whom his money had been stolen or extorted, it was not aboard a whaling ship, neither in the captain’s cabin nor the forecastle. Robert had completed only one thirteen-month voyage aboard the whaler out of Nantucket before signing himself off. Once she herself had made the long voyage home from South America, Sarah’s investigations at the shipping agents had revealed that much, if little else, about her one-time lover who was now her quarry.

After that there had been a long, weary time, which had yielded no information as to his whereabouts, and Sarah had come to understand that her task was beyond daunting. Robert Hanner had simply left Nantucket and vanished into the great continent of America, taking his name and his history, and Sarah Corder’s life and hopes with him.

Once the small notoriety surrounding the return of the young woman who had disguised herself as a sailor had died down, Sarah devoted herself to becoming invisible. It was not a difficult achievement. While her little store of money lasted she travelled the Massachusetts seaboard, staying wherever she could find a cheap bed, then moving on and always searching. Robert was a New Englander. Her belief and most fervent hope was that after all he would not have strayed too far from the familiar horizons of home. She scanned every face she passed in every street, eavesdropped on every conversation she could approach, read all the columns in each local newspaper. There was never any trace of him.

When her money was used up Sarah found employment as a scullery maid in the house of a Boston merchant. She slept in a curtained cubbyhole off the cavernous basement kitchen, and nursed her implacable resolve through the hard and monotonous days like a tender mother with a baby. Her meagre wages and few lonely hours off were all spent in searching the nameless crowds for Robert. When Boston yielded nothing of him she moved again, with a reference grudgingly supplied by the mistress of the house, to Portland and after a few months more to Rockport on Penobscot Bay. She allowed her instincts to guide her because she had no other inspiration. The daily sight of the sea was a reminder of what she had suffered aboard the
Dolphin
and served to firm her intentions, if any such reinforcement were necessary. Sarah had become a grim and melancholy version of the lost young woman to whom Matthias Plant had been drawn so tenderly.

At Rockport she found Robert Hanner. Or rather she stumbled across his name and whereabouts.

One evening, after she had completed her work, she was sitting beside the kitchen range with her weekly diet of the local newspapers. The light was dim and she hunched forward in her chair, turning the smudged columns of newsprint, frowning in concentration as she read. Turning to the Announcements section of the
Advertiser of Eastern Maine
the name she had sought for so long suddenly leapt out at her.